And the fact that they still promote MAUs as a growth metric makes me believe the number even less.
They could hit 1.5 billion tomorrow if a group of hackers got ambitious. The number is practically meaningless. Unique individual numbers are far lower.
>"Your declarative statements unencumbered by any research are fascinating"
Worked for a social gaming company, investigated this exact problem ("How many of our DAUs are multiple accounts?"). For our game, which had mechanics that encouraged player-to-player commerce, the number of these fake accounts was huge: around 40% on DAUs of ~150k. It was clear to me and my co-workers that this was a big issue, everywhere. But everyone in the space benefits from saying "1 BILLION USERS!" when you are selling ad reach. Except for those actually buying ads. Oops.
Moved on to different things, shorted ZNGA in April after the OMGPOP acquisition, having been privy to this scheme. Have made a decent return, covering at ~$5, but missed the last two big drops. I'm not particularly concerned what you choose to believe, because my view has worked out pretty well for me.
Wouldn't it be great if there were an MAU attack against Facebook where a group built a system to create billions of active accounts to the point where the MAU number was greater than the computing population of earth?
If it's close (8 billion), people will likely ignore it as either a rounding/math/counting error, or as "those people who have a 2nd account for their dog".
There are 7 billion people on earth, there are 2.3 billion with Internet access as of 2011 - FB claims that 40-ish% of Internet users are monthly actives, which is clearly BS, so you don't need to get it anywhere near 8 billion. You simply need to get it near or above actual Internet access capable people.
They could hit 1.5 billion tomorrow if a group of hackers got ambitious. The number is practically meaningless. Unique individual numbers are far lower.